Intro to Data Analysis

Agenda

📖 Readings

Who or what is being studied?

POPULATION

All units of analysis (people, institutions, groups, etc.) in which the researcher is interested.

SAMPLE

A subset of people (or institutions, groups, etc.) selected from a population.

N refers to population size

n refers to sample size

DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS

Procedures that help us organize and describe data collected from a sample or population.

INFERENTIAL STATISTICS

Making underlying predictions or inferences about a population using observations and analyses from a sample.

VARIABLES

Any factor, trait, or condition that can exist in differing amounts or types.

Nominal
A variable made up of categories that cannot be ordered

Ordinal
A variable made up of ranked categories, with no systematic or measurable numeric difference between the categories.

Interval-ratio (aka continuous)
A variable with categories that are ordered and expressed in the same units.

Dichotomous (aka binary)
A variable with only two categories.

Which of the following is an example of descriptive statistics?

The average age of UofT students is 21 years.
Students who study more than 10 hours a week are more likely to achieve higher grades
About 65% of U of T undergrads feels socially connected, based on a sample of 300 students.
A hypothesis test shows a significant relationship between income and education level

Which of the following is an example of a nominal level of measurement?

The type of religion a person identifies with (e.g., Christianity, Islam, Judaism)
The number of children in a household
The income of a family in dollars
A ranking of provinces by marriage rate.

Which level of measurement is used when ranking neighborhoods by crime rate (e.g., low, medium, high)?

DISTRIBUTION

Shows all the possible values (or intervals) of the data and how often they occur.

FREQUENCY DISTRIBUTION

A table reporting the number of observations falling into each category of the variable.